February 28, 2007

I know, I know, I’m getting lazy. Or rather, that’s what it would seem. Lately I’ve had projects coming in on all sides, which extended my field to include developing Flash applications, which is a pain in the. Also, Friday is the big premiere I’ve been bragging about the last couple of weeks.

As far as things here are concerned, I’ve decided to write up a better image manipulation package for Symfony as a plugin, based on the Wideimage project. Yes, it’s yet another open source project I’m involved in, but there are several advantages to incorporating this package into a plugin for various reasons:

it handles all GD2-supported image types, other formats can be added by extending the image loader

February 10, 2007

I know I’ve been away a while, but I’ve been knee deep in preparing for our upcoming show and finishing up on some projects at work and at home.

More relevantly (is that even an adjective?), I’ve been implementing the Yahoo! UI JS/CSS libraries, augmented with Jack Slocum’s excellent Yui-Ext. It provides incredible flexibility and code logic organization, better than any I’ve seen so far. I especially like Yahoo’s event handlers, which resemble somewhat the .Net approach, where you can actually define your own events and having object calls abstracted via listeners, further improving object isolation. Not only does this guarantee better object interoperability and easier debugging (imagine going through chains after chains every single time), it takes care of all the wiring for you.

So, to get things back on track, I’ll submit some code snippets from the next upcoming project, Horseshoe, for which I’m developing the browser frontend. It’s actually not a Symfony project, but it’s a tool that everyone could use – a test suite browser, supporting multiple testing engines. The testing server and browser will be decoupled, meaning the interface will be consumable by either the HTML/JS client or a wholly different one, since the server will support multiple protocols.